June 11,2012
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| This is the very first cow that we worked on. Poor girl just calved about 5 hours ago. |
Today was our first day at the clinic, and I have to say, it
was amazing! I learned so much, just from the few animals that we saw. Our objective for our bovine
tuberculosis/brucellosis project was to collect blood, serum, and milk samples
from any cows that we could at the clinic. Our first case of the day was a cow that had just had a calf
that morning, and had a large laceration on the left front teat of its udder. Apparently, the laceration was related
to the calving, and it was also leaking fluid out of its vulva that was reddish
and sticky looking (due to calving).
After that I made my first attempt at getting a blood
sample. I ended up getting the
needle in, and popping the vacutainer on, however, she struggled, and when she
did, my needle pulled out.
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| I made Daryl stand next to a cow to show how small the cows are here compared to the US. |
I was
frustrated with myself, but Dr. MohanKumar said that I had done great for
trying to pull blood on a water buffalo because apparently their veins are
really hard to get to. I realized
later that he was right, because the veterinarians at the college tried at
least 6 or 7 times before they actually got a stick. We collected those samples and then moved on to our next
case.
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| This is the water buffalo that I attempted to pull blood on. |
Our next case was a cow that appeared to be going blind in
both of its eyes, anemic, and it was also crawling with ticks. In India, ticks are really hard to
control, and seem to be a difficulty to treat. At first it was suspected that the animal had anaplasmosis,
which is a blood borne protozoa, caused by ticks, but later it was suspected
that the animal had a blood borne pathogen called theriosmosis (sp?).
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| This is me with the cow that was blind! |
Our next case was a Holstein cross that had abdominal
distention that was thought to be caused by a rumen infection. After collecting samples from that, we
were taken into the gynecology and obstetrics clinic to look at a cow that had
had a mummified calf taken out by cesarean section 4 days ago. Here is the rundown…the cow was brought
in at 6 months gestation after a hard mass was felt during rectal
palpation. The cow was dilated to
1 cm, and upon sonograming, the fetus was pronounced dead. She was given PGF2a to lyse the corpus
luteum, and induce abortion. She
was then given estrogen to prime her structures so that oxytocin, a hormone
used for milk letdown and birthing, could take effect. After that, she was given an inverted L
nerve block, and an incision was made on the left side of her body as to avoid
the duodenum (part of the small intestine), and to be able to differentiate
between the uterus and the rumen, all the while avoiding the omentum. Then, the mummified calf was taken out,
and she was sewn up. There are
many reasons why this calf could have been mummified, but nothing had been
figured out yet. I realize that a
lot of you reading this blog have no idea what any of this means, but please
know that this is a way for me to journal about the things that I have done as
a way to remember them for future cases J
After that, we sampled 3 cows that were all presenting the
same problems. All had calved
within the last 2 months, had gone off feed, and their milk yield had
dramatically dropped. These are
all classic signs of ketosis. When
cows are milking, they are diverting a lot of their nutrients, and fat into the
milk they make. Therefore, when
cows go off feed, they still keep diverting nutrients to that need instead of
their bodies, and they mobilize fat.
An intravenous injection of dextrose will generally fix the ketosis, but
the bigger question that one must find the answer to is, “Why did the cow go
off feed in the first place?” You
can fix the ketosis, but sometimes if you don’t find the root of the problem,
it will keep happening.
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| This is a native breed of horse that they have here in India. I'm not sure what it is called exactly, but its ears turn in to face each other, which is strange, and they have really long legs! |
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| This is a picture of a Brahman bull. He was not very happy when they were working on him, and was actually quite scary at times! We also got to see a few goats that had impactions, which is common in India because they eat a lot of garbage, and one of them had a palpable impaction the size of a baseball! After we had collected as many samples as we could, and collected the medical histories, we came back to the hostel for lunch. After lunch we are going back to the clinic to run milk ring tests to test for brucellosis, and to extract DNA from the milk samples. Should be a fun rest of the day! |
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